The belief was that Skiba had kidnapped his daughter and had run, possibly with Chivers, who was also missing. Russell said Skiba wasn’t happy about the divorce and occasionally said he wished he could spend more time with his daughter.

Sarah Skiba

“He would say things that led me to believe he might take her,” Russell said.

On Feb. 8, a felony charge of violation of custody was filed in Grand County, where Michelle lived. A warrant for Skiba’s arrest was issued on Feb. 10, 1999.

Over the years Skiba had been arrested for mostly misdemeanor criminal offenses.

In 1988, he pleaded guilty to a false reporting charge in Boulder County. In 1990, he was charged with harassment, but pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in Jefferson County.

In 1991, he was convicted on a charge of menacing, a more serious offense, in Douglas County. He was placed on probation for two years. In 1993, he was charged with harassment, again in Douglas County. The same year he was also charged with disorderly conduct and in a separate case possession of marijuana.

But Skiba’s mother, Sharon Skiba, didn’t believe her son would have taken off with his daughter. He wouldn’t abandon his business. He had just borrowed money to buy a third truck, she told me in an interview five years ago.

His daughter Sarah meant too much to him to risk losing contact with her, she had told me. If he kidnapped her and got caught he would surely lose visiting rights with his daughter, she reasoned.

On the same day her son and granddaughter disappeared she had flown to Minnesota to attend a funeral for her mother. While she was there she received a phone call telling her that Paul and Sarah had disappeared.

When she returned home, Sharon Skiba spoke with her son’s neighbors who told her that he had had a fight with his girlfriend and he had told her to leave the home.

A week after her son’s disappearance, Sharon Skiba drove with her son’s best friend, Rich, to her son’s business. There was a lock on a gate leading into a fenced lot that they hadn’t seen before. Rich jumped the fence. When he walked up to the moving truck, he moved a plywood panel away from the side of the truck and saw bullet holes.

Other members of Skiba’s and Chivers’ families drove to the lot and began searching. Chivers had two small children that were about the same age as Sarah.

They noticed that the 1978 Chevrolet moving truck was parked front-end first into a parking spot. That was very odd.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.